Now It Can Be Told Part 24

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward, round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes of sh.e.l.ls, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by German bombers until it jammed.

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his, flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until reinforcements reached him.

Another officer of the Buff's-by name Smeltzer-withdrew his platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of nothing except that "when the Boches began sh.e.l.ling I got into a dugout, and when they stopped I came out again."

There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare-one V. C., sixteen D. S. C.'s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military Medals-were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time, made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern took the highest toll of life and limbs.

V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, "Listen!"

Through the open door came the music of a mouth-organ, and it was playing an old tune:

G.o.d rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine, rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the window-panes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of distant guns.

"Christmas Eve!" said an officer. "Nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago... and now-this!"

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its feast-day, in places where Death had been busy-and where the spirit of evil lay in ambus.h.!.+

So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of the enemy's guns. Already six hundred civilians-mostly women and children-had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting together through broken window-panes, and children were staring into little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and sh.e.l.l-broken walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier's boots-a French Hop o' My Thumb in the giant's boots-was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers read their legends and laughed at them: "My heart is to you." "Good luck." "To the success!" "Remind France."

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was spending it.

"The people at home will be glad of 'em," he said. "I s'pose one can't forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain't the same thing out here."

Going in search of Christmas, I pa.s.sed through a flooded countryside and found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed, fountains of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side-slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply-columns churning up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white beard must have lifted his red gown high-waist-high-when he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open s.p.a.ces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy's lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, "It's best to get a move on here," and, "This road is swept by machine-gun fire," and, "I don't like this corner; it's quite unhealthy."

But that absurd idea-of Santa Claus in the trenches-came into my head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the glint of his red cloak.

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small group of Yorks.h.i.+re lads were chaffing one another.

"Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?" asked a lad, grinning down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.

"Likely, ain't it?" said the other boy. "Father Christmas would be a b.l.o.o.d.y fool to come out here... They'd be full of water in the morning."

"You'll get some presents," I said. "They haven't forgotten you at home."

At that word "home" the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was a girlish-looking fellow-perhaps that was why his comrades were chaffing him-and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back to some village in Yorks.h.i.+re.

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas with contemptuous irony.

"A happy Christmas!" said one of them, with a laugh. "Plenty of crackers about this year! Tom Smith ain't in it."

"And I hope we're going to give the Boches some Christmas presents," said another. "They deserve it, I don't think!"

"No truce this year?" I asked.

"A truce?... We're not going to allow any monkey-tricks on the parapets. To h.e.l.l with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We've got to get on with the war. That's my motto."

Other men said: "We wouldn't mind a holiday. We're fed up to the neck with all this muck."

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling sh.e.l.ls, and the rattle on the keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more sh.e.l.ls into a bit of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel sh.e.l.ls were bursting, and behind the lines our "heavies" were busily at work firing at long range.

"On earth peace, good-will toward men."

The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines, and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells which came clas.h.i.+ng on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of great guns.

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by the splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.

VI

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year, and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and there was no peace on earth.

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of war. I heard the New-Year's chorus when I went to see the last of the year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence. It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories, to thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The "heavies" were indulging in a special strafe this New-Year's eve. As I went down a road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of sh.e.l.ls, and the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's sense of sound. All about me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was no other sound, no noise of human life. There were no New-Year's eve rejoicings among those rows of miners' cottages on the edge of the battlefield. Half those little red-brick houses were blown to pieces, and when here and there through a cracked window-pane I saw a woman's white face peering out upon me as I pa.s.sed I felt as though I had seen a ghost-face in some black pit of h.e.l.l.

For it was h.e.l.lish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always under the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there pa.s.sed all belief. From a sh.e.l.l-hole in a high wall I looked across the field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New-Year's eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the broad desolation and listened to the enormous clangor of great guns.

Coming back that day through Bethune I met some very human life. It was a big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to see what "Tommy" was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and saw a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that sector and the naval men did their little bit by the side of the lads in khaki, who liked this visit. They discovered the bomb store and opened such a Brock's benefit that the enemy must have been shocked with surprise. One young marine was bomb-slinging for four hours, and grinned at the prodigious memory as though he had had the time of his life. Another confessed to me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off all night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the dugouts, and every hour was a long thrill.

"I don't mind saying," said a petty officer who had fought in several naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, "that I had a fair fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to look through a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. 'At night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the parapet I put my head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack... But I'm blessed if it wasn't a swarm of rats!"

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.

"Come up and have a look, Jack," he said to one of the bluejackets.

"Not in these trousers, old mate!" said that young man.